This is revised from the spring of 1999. I've been looking at my walk through life as a whole-the life I have lived, or the state of life I have lived in, and I have been unable to find the words to describe my state of life lived. I revised this today with added descriptions. Why I thought of it today was unconscious and disconnected, but now grounded. I think I have been looking at the state of dissociation I have lived in, and in some ways continue to live in.

Written 4/2/1999

Revised 12/16/2008

I'm sitting on my porch step. It's dark and quiet, except for the sparkles of stars, the warm flicker of a candle I have lit, the concerto of chirping crickets, the lights of lightning bugs dancing to the beat of croaking bullfrogs. My cat's brilliant, calm, blue eyes glow as he speaks to me wrapping his soft, rabbit fur purrs around me creating a symphony.

I hear the approaching train. The low thunder of the massive power in the engines grows louder with heaviness pulling with all its might up a long, gradual incline. The beacon glows brighter making jagged silhouettes out of a line of trees, and the engines are emerging from them like a herd of stampeding mammoths. The dark night is pierced by a warning of a long, song of crying, and dark, and crying, and dark quickening thunder, and silence. A lone bird serenades mellowly.

I am a monarch butterfly on the wall. I flutter from trailing vine to blooming flower. I wander through serenades of falling petals, and weeping birds. My domain is vast I can fly, flutter, and wander following the highways of trailing vines. The walls cannot contain me for I can cross the Atlantic. My wings flutter with freedom along the trailing vine highways on the walls.

Until.

My fluttering wings are slowed by the vibrations of distant thunder of a long approaching train. My fluttering wings slow to a beaten stop-beaten by the pounding thunder heard so loudly in my ears, and feeling like jolts in my chest, wishing I could break only the wall with my beaten wings, fly with the storming train blowing by in a gust within a broken wing's reach.

I cry my drowning song with beaten wings only the train hears. Silence.

I flutter through the highways of green trailing vines, I wander through the yellow blooming flowers, falling pink petals, and serenading blue birds, and I fly across lands and oceans. cpyrghtagm